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This is a PowerPoint that was shared during an assessment workshop in the summer of 2020 by Dr. Nicola Imbracsio. 

Title: The Power of Education Abroad: Lessons from Sustainable Community Development in TanzaniaPresenters: Jonathan Choti (Department of Linguistics, Languages, and Cultures/CAL)Format: Paper PresentationDate: May 11th, 2023Time: 10:00 am - 11:15 amClick here to viewDescription:Many college students are participating in study abroad programs during their undergraduate studies. The Institute for International Education estimated that 240,000 college students studied abroad in 2006/2007. Kim & Goldstein (2005) established that female students participate in study abroad more frequently than males. Besides, research shows that undergraduate students who study abroad become globally engaged in a variety of ways later. These findings underline the importance of education abroad programs in terms of curricula, pedagogy, student and faculty experiences, outcomes as well as benefits and challenges. This talk will provide more insights about study abroad programs. I will share my six-year experience directing a six-week summer education abroad program known as “Sustainable Community Development in Tanzania”. This talk focuses on the curriculum, pedagogy, benefits, and challenges of the program. This program offers students an opportunity to have a community-engaged and cross-cultural learning experience, learn Swahili, have a home-stay experience, participate in multi-disciplinary experiential research teams, room with Tanzanian students, and work with Tanzanian faculty and locals to address urgent issues in the community. Travelling to a foreign country and experiencing a distant culture while earning academic credits are inherent values of this program. Students develop appreciation for a new culture and critical thinking and other cognitive skills, improve their interpersonal and communication skills, and establish enduring relationships. Consequently, they exhibit a deep sense of intercultural empathy and understanding, participate in the Peace Corp Program, join international and non-profit organizations, and become global citizens, full with global values and engagement patterns.

Have you ever reviewed someone’s instructional materials and wondered how to gently tell them that, well, they are terrible?
One way to go about it is to reference research and theory, so it isn’t personal. A favorite of mine is Richard Mayer’s Principles of Multimedia Learning. These principles provide a nice way to support the following thoughts:

“So many words on that slide! Visuals, please!”
“Too many ideas on that one slide!”
“Ugh, the busy design, the animations, make them stop!”
“Information overload! Break it up, pare it down!“
“You sound like a stuffy academic instead of the awesome person you are! Keep it informal. Ditch the jargon!”
“Yes, you are very photogenic, but can I please see a visual instead of your face?”

Instructional materials such as videos or PowerPoints can make or break what you teach. Take the time to do them well.
Check out the article How to use Mayer's 12 Principle of Multimedia, which summarizes Mayer’s principles nicely. If you want to go straight to the source, the MSU library has you covered. Check out Mayer's book Multimedia Learning (2009), Cambridge University Press.

This resource about the Responsible Conduct of Research discusses the process of identifying mentors and how to have an appropriate mentor/trainee relationship.

This resource about Responsible Conduct of Research discusses ethical animal care and how to properly conduct research using animals.

The attached PowerPoint is an overview of semester-long course projects as an option for high-impact assessment design. Author, Andrea Bierema has a joint appointment with the Center for Integrative Studies in General Science and the Department of Integrative Biology. In addition to this position, she teaches during the summer at Kellogg Biological Station. Dr. Bierema’s research spans undergraduate biology education and avian communication.
Dr. Bierema has graciously shared examples from her own courses. You can see examples of assignments, peer review, and discussion boards.

Community engagement can be a powerful tool for both connecting classroom learning to real life experiences and supporting community change efforts. In this our last post on community engagement in teaching, we want to address two questions: : 1) How can teachers attend to ethical concerns that may arise throughout community engagement projects?; and 2) How can teachers integrate routine reflection as a strategy to assess student learning throughout community engagement projects? Reflective activities create a critical space for us to capture the ethical issues arising with students and to reflect on our own ethical practice as instructors for community engaged courses. And we could not discuss ethical concerns without students being able to reflect about specific issues. For this last post in our community engagement series, we will focus on the ways we made sure to support student learning by exploring potential ethical issues and creating regular reflective opportunities.
Ethical Considerations When Engaging Communities
The ethical issues you must attend to are both community- and student-focused. Returning to  the community engagement spectrum from our previous two posts (Preparation and Implementation), the ethical considerations broaden as students become more immersed in communities. For example, we both had concerns about communities being exploited for the sake of students’ learning. To address this concern, Jenny (service learning) spent time with community partners prior to her course to gain an understanding about what would make the project meaningful to them and built mechanisms into the course to attend to those needs. Katie (photovoice) built guidelines for students’ photos into her photovoice rubric, spent time in class talking to students about ethical photography, and encouraged  students to ask questions they may have about their photos.
We both felt it would be unethical for students to engage with communities without first considering the impact their own identities and expectations on their work. We made sure students thought about privileged and oppressed identities, assumptions they hold  about communities that they might engage with, and how they might manage or interpret challenging experiences. Overall, we focused students on reflecting as an ethical imperative to ensure the experience worked well for community members and for students, but also as an assessment process to enhance student learning.
Reflection for Learning in Community Engagement
Reflection can be a useful tool for both students and instructors to more fully understand learning during community engagement activities. We both used multiple tools for reflection based in course objectives, both formal and informal, and creatively responding to the unexpected elements of this work. Below, we highlight how you can prepare to incorporate reflection into your community engagement efforts, along with some helpful tips for doing so that we derived from our own work
A) Reflect Flexibly Toward Course Objectives
If you’ve already elected to use community engagement as part of your course, you should consider how it will match up with course objectives. This can be very direct if you’re reading an article or bringing in a speaker about a particular topic, but may require more scaffolding if you’re integrating an experience like photovoice, service learning, or study abroad. Here, it’s essential to anticipate multiple student experiences of community engagement work. Make sure that reflection prompts are broad enough so that all students can participate, but still focused enough they are reflecting back toward the overall project and course objectives. For example, in Katie’s course, she had a full class dedicated to reflection incorporating definitions, examples and an assignment using a reflection tool called the “Ladder of Inference.” These activities taught students how to identify their own learning and thinking changed about particular issues, preparing to do deeper reflection in their photovoice project, and further connecting back to the overall course objectives of examining how concepts of power and oppression relate to social issues.
B) Reflect Informally and Formally
It’s essential to provide a spectrum of ways students can reflect on their learning. This spectrum builds a comprehensive culture of reflection in your course and provides multiple windows into student learning during community engagement and beyond. Providing informal reflection spaces help students build up to more formal, graded reflections on their work. These informal reflections could include short discussions, posing quick questions to students after explaining something, and/or having students keep a journal of their thoughts during community engagement work. And eventually building formal reflection into the course provides a culminating space for student to think about their learning across community engagement experiences. Final papers or projects can  provide a powerful picture of what students experienced and continue to validate both the community engagement work and the importance of regular reflection in connection to it. Whatever mixture of formal and informal reflection you decide on, make sure to integrate the results of the student reflection into your instruction moving forward. Through lectures and learning activities, demonstrate you’ve heard and are thinking about what students said.
C) Reflect Creatively
Reflective activities and assignments don’t have to fit within the bounds of traditional assessment strategies. There is plenty of room for creativity in setting up these activities.For example, Katie hosted a photovoice gallery in her classroom where students could explore their peers’ interpretations of the activity. Then, students had the opportunity to engage in discussion to reflect on what they’ve learned as a group from participating in the process. Doing this in both a big group and individually can speak to multiple learning styles. It also provides a space for students to generate new understandings of their experiences.
D) Reflect on the Unexpected
Realize that reflections may go beyond the scope of your course objectives and be prepared to facilitate learning that departs from expected directions. Community engagement can be both messy and beautiful. Leave space for unpacking the complexities.
We hope this series of blog posts helped remove some of the mystique regarding community engagement in the classroom. Getting students to connect course topics to what is going on around them can be rewarding and exciting! As you continue to consider incorporating community engagement into your own work, what ethical concerns do you need to consider? How important is reflection in your course? What reflective activities could you do to prepare your students for engagement and to assess their learning? We are always looking for new ideas so please share with us in the comments below!
 

 
Originally posted at “Inside Teaching MSU” (site no longer live): Gregory K. and Lawlor, J. Building Community Engagement into Your Course: Ethics and Reflections. inside teaching.grad.msu.edu

This resource on the Responsible Conduct of Research offers an overview of the ethical expectations and responsibilities for anyone doing research, scholarship, or creative activities at MSU. It emphasizes both the varying responsibilities graduate students have to various individuals (advisor, PI, self, family) and institutions (MSU, grant-funding bodies) as well as the responsibilities those individuals and institutions have to graduate students in pursuit of their scholarship